The Dissect module tying all other Dissect modules together. It provides a programming API and command line tools which allow easy access to various data sources inside disk images or file collections (a.k.a. targets). For more information, please see the documentation.
This project is part of the Dissect framework and requires Python.
Information on the supported Python versions can be found in the Getting Started section of the documentation.
dissect.target is available on PyPI.
pip install dissect.targetThis module is also automatically installed if you install the dissect package.
If you wish to use the YARA plugin (target-query -f yara), you can install dissect.target[yara] to automatically
install the yara-python dependency.
target-query is a tool used to query specific data inside one or more targets.
These queries are available in the form of functions that reside within plugins.
Each plugin is focussed on providing specific functionality.
This functionality can range from parsing log sources, such as command history logs (i.e. bash history, PowerShell history, etc.), to returning the hostname and operating system version.
The most basic basic usage of target-query is to execute a function on a target:
target-query -f <FUNCTION_NAME> /example_path/target.vmdkYou can also use basic path expansion to execute functions over multiple targets. For example, to execute a function
on all .vmdk files in a directory:
target-query -f <FUNCTION_NAME> /example_path/*.vmdk
Not every target plugin will function on every target, they are OS specific.
More information on how to use target-query is found in the documentation.
target-shell gives you the ability to access a target using a virtual shell environment. Once a shell is opened
on a target, type help to list the available commands. To see the documentation of each command,
you can use help [COMMAND].
Opening a shell on a target is straight-forward. You can do so by specifying a path to a target as follows:
target-shell targets/EXAMPLE.vmx
EXAMPLE /> help
Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
cat disks filesystems help less python save
cd exit find hexdump ls readlink stat
clear file hash info pwd registry volumes
EXAMPLE /> ls
c:
sysvolFurther interacting with the target can be done using the commands listed above.
You can exit the shell by running exit or by pressing CTRL+D.
More information on how to use target-shell is found in the documentation.
With target-fs you can interact with the filesystem of a target using a set of familiar Unix commands.
The basic structure of a target-fs command is as follows:
target-fs <path_to_target> <command> <path_for_command>NOTE: As with any shell command, you have to properly escape backlashes and spaces. Unless you use single or double quotes (', ").
More information on how to use target-fs is found in the documentation.
With target-reg you can easily query the registry of Windows targets and print the results in a tree. A + symbol indicates that it is a registry key (i.e. may have subkeys). A - symbol indicates a registry value.
user@dissect~$ target-reg targets/EXAMPLE.E01 -k "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft"
+ 'Microsoft' (last-modified-date-shows-here)
+ '.NETFramework' (last-modified-date-shows-here)
- 'Enable64Bit' value-shows-here
[...]More information on how to use target-reg is found in the documentation.
With target-dump you can export records of a specific function used in target-query to a file.
The basic structure of a target-dump command is as follows:
target-dump -f <comma_seperated_functions> <path_to_target>Futhermore, the tool can apply certain compression algorithms to the dump, to create small archives of the output.
More information on how to use target-dump is found in the documentation.
With target-dd you can export (a part of) a target to a file or to stdout. At the moment, target-dd can be used for targets that have only one disk.
The basic structure of a target-dd command is as follows:
target-dd --write <output_file> --offset <offset_on_target_in_bytes> --bytes <nr_of_bytes_to_read> <path_to_target>More information on how to use target-dd is found in the documentation.
With target-mount you can mount the filesystem of a target to any arbitrary directory on your analysis machine, similar to the mount command on Unix systems.
To perform this function, we use fusepy to mount a filesystem in linux and mac.
This interacts with fuselib to mount disk images in linux userspace, so no administrative access is required.
target-mount has two required positional arguments:
TARGET- Target to mountMOUNT- Directory to mount the target's filesystem on
The following example command can be used to mount a target to the directory mnt:
user@dissect~$ target-mount targets/EXAMPLE.vmx ~/mnt/EXAMPLE
user@dissect~$ ls ~/mnt/EXAMPLE/
disks fs volumesWhen mounting a target using target-mount the process is kept in the foreground. This will occupy your current
terminal session. It is recommended to either open a second terminal, let this command run in the background by
appending & to the command or use a terminal multiplexer like tmux to start a second session. Using one
of these methods enables you to interact with the mountpoint.
More information on how to use target-mount is found in the documentation.
This project uses tox to build source and wheel distributions. Run the following command from the root folder to build
these:
tox -e buildThe build artifacts can be found in the dist/ directory.
tox is also used to run linting and unit tests in a self-contained environment. To run both linting and unit tests
using the default installed Python version, run:
toxFor a more elaborate explanation on how to build and test the project, please see the documentation.
The Dissect project encourages any contribution to the codebase. To make your contribution fit into the project, please refer to the development guide.
Dissect is released as open source by Fox-IT (https://www.fox-it.com) part of NCC Group Plc (https://www.nccgroup.com).
Developed by the Dissect Team ([email protected]) and made available at https://github.com/fox-it/dissect.
License terms: AGPL3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html). For more information, see the LICENSE file.